Dana White: “Pretorian owes us a lot of money”

Last week it was revealed that omnipresent Brazilian sponsor Pretorian had been given the boot by the UFC. If there was any backlash, it all happened on Brazilian websites in languages I don’t read, so I didn’t see anything about it. Now Dana White gives us a little info on what initiated the blacklisting:

I just didn’t know if we wanted to talk about that publicly. We weren’t stopping Pretorian from anything … um … Pretorian owes us a lot of money. Yeah. They haven’t paid. So that’s the story.

Dana is probably referring to the so-called ‘sponsorship tax’ that companies have to pay if they want to get their brand featured during UFC events. While anyone can sponsor a fighter, you need to pony up to the UFC if you want your logo appearing on clothing or banners etc during the broadcast. The fee is determined on a case by case basis and is apparently as high as six figures for some companies. How much it was for Pretorian, who knows. But if Dana White (a guy who plays 10k hands of blackjack on the reg) says it was ‘a lot of money’, you can imagine the number involved a lot of zeros.